The year began with high hopes for Ukrainian troops, who are planning a counteroffensive against Russia. It ended with disappointment on the battlefield, an increasingly somber mood among the troops and concerns about the future of Western aid to Ukraine's war effort.
In between, there was a short-lived uprising in Russia, a dam burst in Ukraine, and too much bloodshed on both sides of the conflict.
Twenty-two months after its invasion, Russia has control of about a fifth of Ukraine, and the roughly 1,000-kilometer-long front line has barely moved this year.
A crunch has arisen on the battlefield. In Western countries that have supported Ukraine's fight against its much larger opponent, political discussions about billions in financial aid are becoming increasingly tense.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is waiting two years after starting a war that turned out to be a costly miscalculation by the Kremlin. He expects Western support to gradually erode, fractured by political divisions, eroded by war fatigue and distracted by other demands, such as China's threat to Taiwan and war in the Middle East.
The international political outlook could turn sharply in Putin's favor after next November's election in the United States – by far Ukraine's largest military supplier and where some Republican candidates are pushing to end support for Ukraine's war.
A body lies on the ground in front of a burning market after an attack in the city center of Kostiantynivka, Ukraine, on Wednesday, September 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Nearly half of the U.S. population believes the country spends too much on Ukraine, according to a poll released in November by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
“The political landscape on both sides of the Atlantic is changing,” says Charles Kupchan, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC. “Transatlantic solidarity was stable. But I don’t think it will last forever.”
The changing mood could benefit Putin, analysts say, as he seeks to at least keep Ukraine in suspense and eventually force it to accept a bad deal to end the war. Putin announced in early December that he would run for re-election in March, all but guaranteeing that he will maintain his repressive hold on Russia for at least another six years.
“It was a good year, I would even call it a great year for Putin,” said Mathieu Boulegue, adviser to the Russia-Eurasia program at the Chatham House think tank in London.
Western sanctions have a negative impact on the Russian economy, but do not paralyze it. Russian forces still dominate much of the action on the battlefield, where defensive lines include minefields up to 20 kilometers (12 miles) deep that have largely held back Ukraine's months-long counteroffensive.
The counteroffensive was launched before Ukraine's armed forces were fully ready, a hasty political attempt to show that Western help could change the course of the war, said Marina Miron of King's College London's defense studies department.
“The expectations (of the counteroffensive) were unrealistic,” she said. “It turned out to be a failure.”
In May, Putin won the victory he desperately wanted in the battle for the bombed city of Bakhmut, the longest and bloodiest battle of the war. It was a trophy to show the Russians after his army's winter offensive failed to capture other Ukrainian cities and towns along the front line.
A mutiny by the Wagner mercenary group in June was the biggest challenge to Putin's authority in his more than two decades in power. But it backfired. Putin defused the uprising, maintaining the loyalty of his armed forces and thereby reasserting his influence over the Kremlin.
Wagner boss and mutiny leader Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a mysterious plane crash. And any public dissent about the war was quickly and brutally suppressed by the Russian authorities.
Nevertheless, Putin had to accept setbacks. He came into conflict with the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant against him in March on war crimes charges and accused him of personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine. This made it impossible for him to travel to many countries.
According to the US, Ukraine has so far recaptured about half of the land that Kremlin forces occupied in their full-scale invasion in February 2022, but it will be difficult to reclaim more.
The major Ukrainian push fell far short of its ambitions, even though Western countries had provided Kiev with a variety of weapons and training.
That has raised uncomfortable questions in the West about the best path forward. “We are now in a very difficult moment,” said Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.
A pigeon painted by artist TvBoy decorates the wall of a building damaged by Russian shelling in Irpin, Ukraine, Friday, July 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
The Russians were ruthless in their determination to prevent the Ukrainians from breaking through their lines. They were suspected of sabotaging the large Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper in southern Ukraine because they had the means, motive and opportunity to do so. The collapse of the dam flooded a huge area where Ukrainian forces could potentially have broken through.
Ukraine, for its part, has proven capable of attacking far behind enemy lines and even hitting Moscow with long-range drones. It bloodied Russia's nose by using missiles and drones to hit a key bridge in Moscow-annexed Crimea, oil depots and airfields, and the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.
By showing that it can strike in the Black Sea, Ukraine was able to push Russian warships off the coast, although not completely. At one point, Russia set its sights on Ukraine's Black Sea ports – a key interface for global trade – and its agricultural infrastructure, destroying enough food to feed more than a million people for a year, the British government said.
But although Russia has suffered enormous losses in troops and equipment, the country has the scale to absorb these setbacks.
Cadets practice putting on gas masks during a lesson in a bomb shelter at a cadet lyceum in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 6, 2023. The wall reads: “Glory to Ukraine.” (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Putin, who foreign officials say has secured large supplies of ammunition from North Korea, has put together a state budget that devotes a record amount to defense and increases spending by about 25% in 2024-2026. He has also ordered the country's military to increase troop strength by nearly 170,000 to more than 1.3 million.
For Ukraine, the challenge is to resource another offensive operation. His troops are motivated but exhausted, analysts say.
Zelensky has been tirelessly urging Western leaders to continue providing aid, knowing they are his country's lifeline. He has traveled to Washington three times in the past two years.
US President Joe Biden traveled to Kiev last February as a sign of Western solidarity. He now wants Congress to approve an additional $50 billion for the war in Ukraine.
However, support for Kiev is waning. Biden's proposal is stuck in a divided Senate.
Zelensky won a diplomatic victory at the end of the year when the European Union granted Ukraine accelerated talks to join the EU. But even that triumph was tempered by the knowledge that the process, like gaining NATO membership, could take years.
And the EU's refusal to provide 50 billion euros in aid to sustain Ukraine's struggling economy has been frustrating for Kiev.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni perhaps expressed the predicament most succinctly in November when she accidentally told two Russian prank callers that there was “a lot of fatigue” on the Ukraine issue.
“We are on the verge of the moment when everyone understands that we need a way out,” she said.
___
Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine